A Christmas Horror Story - A Review

My husband and I watched this movie last weekend, and I didn’t have high hopes. I was pretty sure it was going to be awful but fun. I was actually pretty surprised.

My first inclination when I watched the film was that it lacked focus. Basically, it is four different stories that occur in one place. The significance of that place is that terrible murders happened the year before, so there’s this evil that hangs around. From the cover, you would assume that evil is Krampus, and it kind of is, but there are other creatures that also make an appearance.

The film also incorporates various horror film tropes from found footage to possession to hauntings to creature features to zombies to psychological. As I said, when I first started watching the movie, it felt like it was all over the place with no real mission.

Surprisingly, there was even a scare that made both my husband and I jump. This is pretty rare, and we were expecting it, but it still got us. That made me pretty happy.

By the end of the film, I couldn’t figure out what in the hell I had just watched. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t excellent either—it just was. For the next several days, I couldn’t get the film out of my mind. I kept replaying what I had seen and tried to figure out what it meant. Finally, I think I figured it out. I think I know what the film was trying to accomplish, and it inspired me to write an essay.

While I don’t think A Christmas Horror Story will become a classic, it probably will find a cult following. The special effects were done well and parts of it were creepy. It inspired me to look deeper and write about it, so it wasn’t all bad.

Has anyone else seen the film? What are your thoughts?